c
hearth, and hurried her into the brilliant and adventurous career amidst
which we find her in 1651. Then her greatest fear was to fall again into
her husband's hands. M. de Longueville had very willingly followed his
wife in the Fronde; his own discontentments of themselves drove him into
it, as well as his uncertain and mobile character which led him to
embark in novel enterprises with as much facility as it urged him to
abandon them. In 1649 he had figured as one of the generals of Paris,
and had raised Normandy against Mazarin. One year of imprisonment had
cooled him, and in 1651, having recovered his government of Normandy and
tasted some few months of that peaceful grandeur, he found it so much to
his liking as to be not readily tempted to re-embark upon a stormy
course of life at the age of nearly fifty-seven. Reports, only too true,
had informed him of what until then he had only surmised
imperfectly--the declared _liaison_ of his wife with La Rochefoucauld.
He had been greatly irritated at it, and Conde's enemies, with De Retz
at their head, carefully fostered his ill humour, and his daughter,
Marie d'Orleans, afterwards Duchess de Nemours, seconded them to the
utmost of her power.

She detested her stepmother, whose faults her strong common-sense led
her easily to scan, without her own vulgar and commonplace mind being
capable of comprehending the Duchess's great qualities. It was
impossible less to resemble each other. The one adored grandeur even to
the romantic and the chimerical, the other was entirely positive and
matter-of-fact, and absorbed with her own interest, especially in those
relating to her property. Alienated from the Fronde through the jealous
hatred she bore towards her stepmother, who in turn liked her almost as
little, and probably also did not take pains enough to manage her,
Mademoiselle turned towards the Queen, and strove to gain over her
father to the same party. Therein she succeeded by degrees. The Duke de
Longueville could not overtly separate himself from Conde, and at first
promised him all he required; then he shut himself up in Normandy, and
there followed a dubious line of conduct which neither compromised him
with the Court party nor that of Conde. But he recalled his wife
peremptorily, and sent her a mandate to rejoin him. That mandate was
pressing and threatening, and it terrified Madame de Longueville. She
knew that her husband had been informed of everything, and that he